Kathy Robbins remembers a time when she longed to read about the LGBTQ+ community in the Twin Cities, only to find mostly negative stories when she opened the pages of her newspaper.
“The mainstream press did not include us unless there was a murder in Loring Park or something,” said Robbins, a librarian at Quatrefoil Library.
Robbins, who identifies as lesbian and moved to the Twin Cities in 1978, has volunteered at Quatrefoil Library since the 1990s. The library, founded in 1986, holds collections of LGBTQ+ media — books, movies, newsletters, CDs and newspapers and magazines — that tell stories not found in the mainstream media decades ago.
The mainstream press might not have paid much attention to LGBTQ+ life in those days, but others did.
Indeed, as the annual Pride Month celebration nears an end, Robbins remembered the 1990s and early 2000s as a time when the Twin Cities market for LGBTQ+ media was at its peak with publications like Equal Time, Focus Point, GLC Voice, Gaze Magazine, Lavender and others.
Many of those publications — some dating to the 1970s — did not last long, and even the ones that did, like Equal Time, are not around anymore. Lavender, a bi-weekly publication that started in 1995, remains.
Related | Your guide to Twin Cities Pride events
Those magazines and newspapers, Robbins recalled, published stories pertaining to the LGBTQ+ community and also served as tools for socialization and community building.
Referring to Equal Time, she said: “This is the news of the community and people and obituaries and movies and whatever it was. There’s a lot of content in that. Same with Focus Point.”
The community-based papers had a symbiotic relationship with gay people and their allies. For example, Kathy’s wife was a real estate agent who would advertise in the papers. It also served as a form of social media, in a way, because people could put information in the classified ads — similar to dating profiles.
Publication challenges
Covering LGBTQ+ communities presented many challenges, too. Sapa Carlson worked on the advertising team at Equal Time and later went on to start Focus Point with someone else.
“It was a really hard time because most gay people were not out and wanted information and news, but many people were afraid to even have somebody see them pick up a newspaper, afraid to go to a gay bar,” Carlson said. “Imagine being a reporter and yet you can’t put anybody’s name in the story that you’re writing about because they’re afraid they’ll get fired or lose their housing.”
Carlson had just lost her job as a camp director after her supervisors found out she was gay when she was hired at Equal Time to work in advertising.
“They wanted to grow the newspaper, but they didn’t want mainstream advertising. You couldn’t get a lot of gay ads, because that would be outing people and so you can see how the conflict sets up,” she said. “We wanted to become part of the mainstream so that we didn’t need a gay newspaper. We wanted our stories to be published. We wanted to go anywhere, to do anything, and not to be singled out or prevented from doing things because we were gay.”
While Focus Point and Equal Time would deliver papers through local spaces, like bars and coffee shops, they had subscriber lists and would mail the newspapers to subscribers in plain envelopes with no return address.
“They were afraid somebody would see that they got a gay newspaper,” she said. “We had people that would help us to deliver the newspaper in bundles. Sort of like the dark of night. We would take these bundles of newspapers and put them in stands. And the biggest distribution place, of course, was the gay bars.”
But the business model wasn’t sustainable, so it went under, she recalled. “It was kind of a real tragedy for the community,” she said.
Carlson then helped to start Focus Point but left after a couple of years due to differences with her business partner. That publication went out of business in 2000.
Stories that made an impact
Equal Time and Focus Point would write about happenings in the community, like softball leagues or people who had left an impact. The publications also contained lots of educational information and resources around advocacy and health — information that these communities weren’t getting in other media.
Ultimately, Carlson said, the media organizations helped to create change around how people perceived LGBTQ+ communities.
“We were part of that change when the change was happening,” she said. “To some degree, we helped the change to happen just by continuing to exist and getting people more comfortable. And then human rights legislation became more of a reality, and corporations like General Mills and 3M and Allianz started to embrace gay workers.”
The day-to-day stories of LGBTQ+ life weren’t being told in other spaces or pages.
“(The mainstream press) wouldn’t care that there was a court case about lesbian custody, which was a big thing,” said Robbins, the Quatrefoil librarian. “You were married. You had kids. Then you came out as a lesbian. And the dad was going to take the kids because it’s, ‘You’re unfit to be a mother.’ And that was very common, unfortunately. We cared about it. The mainstream press didn’t care.”
Is there a gap?
While many of those stories are now included in the mainstream local press, some feel there’s still space in the market for what those shuttered papers once brought to the communities.
“Now, maybe I could say there’s not a need for that kind of newspaper,” Robbins said.
Others, like Claude Peck — the former managing editor of Q Monthly, a subsection of the Twin Cities Reader, a weekly alternative paper that started in 1994 — feel there are still gaps in coverage of LGBTQ+ communities in the Twin Cities.
Q Monthly began as 4-6 pages in the Twin Cities Reader and then became a standalone monthly paper in 1995. Peck estimated that Q Monthly had a distribution of roughly 25,000.
“To this day, I remain very proud of the publication. It had lots of things that I think had been lacking in LGBTQ publications in the Twin Cities,” he said. “We had been pretty well served by things like Equal Time and we had sort of an argumentative paper called GLC Voice. But what I wanted to do with Q Monthly, I wanted longer articles. I wanted really good feature writing. I wanted news. We would do some news, some features, but we also had a lot of attitude.”
The Twin Cities Reader and City Pages were bought in 1997 by Anne Stern Publishing. Q Monthly then went under the umbrella of City Pages — another Minneapolis alternative weekly paper — and continued until Q Monthly was shut down in 1998.
Peck doesn’t think the media today covers these communities in the same way that those publications did.
“There’s a little bit of absorption of, I would say, gay energy or gay perspectives into the mainstreams,” he said. “But not something that, to me, substitutes for, or replaces, a vibrant and varied number of queer publications like we used to have.”
He added: “I think there’s lip service. I think there’s seasonal stuff that pops up, but I wouldn’t say that I’m seeing kind of in-depth coverage. Is there a reporter at the Star Tribune that covers the GLBT community? No, there just isn’t.”
While other forms of LGBTQ+ media have been on the rise — like the movies and books exhibited at Quatrefoil Library — there’s less coverage of the community. Peck said he’s a fan of one audio show, Fresh Fruit on KFAI, which has been running since 1978.
Ava Kian
Ava Kian is MinnPost’s Greater Minnesota reporter. Follow her on Twitter @kian_ava or email her at akian@minnpost.com.
